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“... bear is turned into a totem of masculinity – masculinity as imagined by a boy – and called Alan Measles. Since 2003 Perry has established himself as an accomplished and adventurous broadcaster on such subjects as class and gender. His new book, The Descent of Man, isn’t designed to accompany the Channel Four series All Man, but reuses some of the ...”

“... the clay grew tall, the plastic flowers in the picture windows, the fishman with his van and a boy riding over the ancient humps of trenches on his BMX bike? Well, yes, I suppose it was. Unable still to find our cemetery, we give it up and drive back into Ypres and eat a waffle in a chocolate shop, where plump businessmen dally with the proprietress while ...”

“... book is of Dawid the Younger who in 1788 deserted his homestead and ran away with a slave girl, riding across the Great Fish River, out into Africa, where the Xhosas and the Boers first confronted each other and South Africa’s war began – ‘a war without end, a war that just was, and still is, for what started then is still not finished today.’ Dawid ...”

“... on a tram going down Wellington Road and passing the gasworks, when she lays a hand on my arm. ‘Alan. That is the biggest gasworks in England. And I know the manager.’ A different order of aunt is Aunt Eveline Peel, my grandmother’s sister-in-law. Aunt Eveline is never Aunty Eveline. I suppose because she is older and too substantial for that. A ...”

“... it was a strange, anarchic, self-destructive phase. Much new light is shed on these mysteries by Alan Sykes’s fascinating new book, which covers the 1903-13 period. He traces again the now familiar story of Joseph Chamberlain’s crusade for tariff reform, which captivated the party faithful and captured the party machine between 1903 and 1905. In ...”

“... smiling and flags waving, are scenes of the President basking in the glow of the ‘new spirit’: riding his horse, embracing Olympic heroes, mingling with the people. George Bush visits the Oval Office, presumably to report on a ‘fact-finding’ mission around the country, and tells the President earnestly that ‘there’s a new mood out there. People are ...”

“... Shell Guide, which they sent me this morning. On the lines of the previous volume for the West Riding, edited by William Glossop, it’s splendidly illustrated while like the original Shell guides being chatty and occasionally eccentric. Glossop revealed that Ivor Novello wrote Perchance to Dream in Howroyd Hall near Barkisland in Halifax and that the ...”

“... attention to detail that soap opera is famous for. Meanwhile Elaine Dundy’s Elvis and Gladys and Alan Bleasdale’s Are you lonesome tonight? – which has arrived in the West End from Liverpool – concentrate respectively on the early and final chapters of the life. Both are sober and reflective, anxious to celebrate rather than to sneer. Jerry Hopkins’s ...”

“... of Aylesbury. The originators of successful brand names deserve to be remembered. According to Alan Jackson’s London’s Metropolitan Railway (1986), the name Metroland was the inspiration of James Garland, a copywriter in the company’s publicity department, who was laid up with flu but leapt out of bed in high Archimedean excitement when the name ...”

“... when it is describing these years. The list of names here, from Val Parnell to Peter Brough, from Alan Melville to Jimmy Edwards, reads like a history of British Variety. Even then, unconsciously a student of Method, she would dress up in gymslip and boater, catapult in hand, to do Monica for the wireless. She went to Hollywood for the first time in the ...”

“... a memorable image of Gielgud hoisted in the air astride a headless wooden horse, doing simulated riding. It was also mildly scatological. Due to go on at the Royal Court after a short provincial tour, it suffered a rough passage. At Nottingham pennies were thrown onto the stage and Gielgud was bombarded with abusive letters saying: ‘You have been sold a ...”

“... and the lawns and quadrangles white with frost; coming to it from the soot and grime of the West Riding I thought I had never seen or imagined a place of such beauty. And even today the only place that has enchanted me as much as Cambridge did then is Venice. It was out of term, the university had gone down and apart from candidates like myself who had come ...”

“... do understand, through and through, because it is our own invention, or rather the invention of Alan Turing and John von Neumann. The now famous Universal Turing Machine was an imaginary device that could rearrange any row of l’s and 0’s in accordance with any finite set of rules supplied to it; the von Neumann computer is its electronic ...”

“... racing. ‘I think a cup of coffee is in order,’ I said to Martin Johnson of the Independent and Alan Lee of the Times, ‘and the only place on the ground that serves a proper filtered cup of the stuff is the Hove Shop.’ Most County grounds have an establishment like this, where anything that can reasonably be sold at a profit ...”

“... a colon, books that will settle for nothing less than improvement for their readers. Currently riding high are Why Your Life Sucks: And What You Can Do about It by Alan Cohen, When Children Grieve: For Adults to Help Children Deal with Death, Divorce, Pet Loss, Moving and Other Losses by John James and Russell ...”